


Difficult Things

by WretchedArtifact



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Domesticity, Happy Ending, Light Angst, M/M, Magical Pregnancy, Mpreg, Post-Canon, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:14:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23777440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WretchedArtifact/pseuds/WretchedArtifact
Summary: "Have you thought about it?” Fjord asked Caduceus, the words sticky in his mouth. “Kids?”After years of adventuring, Fjord and Caduceus start putting down roots, and Fjord is faced with a difficult question that he doesn't know the answer to.
Relationships: Caduceus Clay/Fjord
Comments: 9
Kudos: 147
Collections: Unusual_Bearings_2020





	Difficult Things

**Author's Note:**

  * For [littlespaceposts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/littlespaceposts/gifts).



Of the many vows and pledges Fjord had made to the Wildmother over the years, the simplest one was:

_I will do difficult things in your name._

He would endure physical hardships for her. He would suffer mental strain for her. He would go sleepless, hungry, and cold if it meant he was doing the right thing in her eyes. So many times, after a hard-fought battle, he would collapse battered and bruised to the ground and find himself comforted by satisfaction, so rich and deep that he could feel it moving through his veins like blood. After a childhood of loveless struggle, after his unwilling servitude to a capricious patron, he was finally fulfilling a higher purpose in life. And he was doing it of his own free will. He was going out into a shithole world and making it better, shining the love and light of Melora on a thousand hidden pockets of rot and decay.

But simple vows were tricky, underneath the surface. Their roots got tangled and gnarled. _I will do difficult things in your name_ didn’t just mean charging into battle, or protecting the downtrodden. It meant hearing the quiet longing in Caduceus’s voice when he spoke about the Blooming Grove, and choosing not to ignore it. It meant taming the itch of wanderlust under his heels and starting to put down some roots. “I wouldn’t want to live there again,” Caduceus said, as they lay entwined together on a lumpy inn mattress, halfway to the Savalirwood. “It feels too small for me now. But I’d like to be close. Close enough to visit, if the urge strikes.”

“Close enough to drop in, grab some tea, and get out,” Fjord said.

“Exactly,” Caduceus said. “Close enough for Colton’s kids to have somewhere to run away to, when they need a little adventure.”

 _Kids._ That was another gnarled root for Fjord to contend with. The Clay family tree, frozen for years by stone and blight, had slowly started to flower again. Colton’s daughters, Clarabelle’s little son—it was embarrassing how easily Fjord was thrown off his game in their presence. He could stare down devils and demons without blinking, but the shout of children’s voices sent his mind right back to the orphanage. The sound of children’s laughter, happy and mocking, could shrink him down to half his height if he wasn’t guarding against it.

One at a time, though, they weren’t so bad. Less than three months after they settled into their new home, Fjord answered the door to find Colton’s eldest daughter Cleo standing there, clutching a leather satchel with a glower on her face. “Caduceus?” Fjord called back into the house. “We have a, uh, wayward youth on our doorstep.”

Caduceus came to the doorway, kitchen apron dusted down the front with flour, whisking something in a mixing bowl cradled in the crook of his arm. When Cleo saw him, she inhaled raggedly and said, “My _father—_ _”_

“I know,” Caduceus said sympathetically. “He’s a lot, isn’t he? Come inside, we’ll get you something to eat.”

Cleo stayed with them for a week. At first she stuck close to Caduceus, following him from the kitchen to the garden as he went about his day, and he listened to her aggrieved venting patiently and dropped in a few well-considered pieces of advice whenever she ran out of steam. But once she had gotten the anger out of her system—and, Fjord suspected, once she got tired of being asked to assist with chores in the kitchen and garden—he found her shadowing _him_ instead. Cleo watched with great interest as Fjord went about his maintenance of the arms and armor he and Caduceus had collected over the years, oiling and polishing and buffing away rust. When he took out the Star Razor, he saw her lean forward, and she touched a tentative, pale-pink finger to the flat of the blade. “Calliope told me about your sword,” Cleo said. “She said it was over a thousand years old. It doesn’t _look_ that old.”

“It’s been reforged a few times between then and now,” Fjord said. “The body’s old but the clothes are new, I guess you could say.”

Cleo traced the runes etched into the blade, and Fjord could almost swear she looked covetous. “You used it when you fought the gorgon at the Court of Beasts, right?” she asked. “When you saved my family from being petrified?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say _I_ saved them,” Fjord said. “It was a group effort.”

“Right, there were nine of you.”

“Well—” Fjord began, but he felt preemptively tired at the thought of trying to explain Zemnian wordplay to a child. “Yes, the nine of us.”

Cleo wrapped her hand around the sword hilt, and she got a gleam in her eye that Fjord didn’t trust. “Can I try using it?” she asked.

Fjord didn’t have the firmest grasp on firbolg ages, but he knew that, despite already being chest-high to Fjord, Cleo was basically just a little kid. And you weren’t supposed to give weapons to little kids. Beau _still_ sometimes gave him shit about that time he gave a dagger to four-year-old Kiri. But Cleo looked so hopeful and eager as she stared at Fjord’s sword that it tugged on his heartstrings a little. “Hey, Caduceus?” Fjord called over his shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“You think Cleo’s old enough to use a sword?”

“Depends on what she’s using it against,” Caduceus said.

There was an old fallen log that marked one edge of their garden, and Fjord went out and hoisted it up so it was leaning against the side of the house. “Maybe we won’t start with the centuries-old magic blade,” he said, and dug around in his bag of holding until he found an old sword he’d taken off a fallen enemy. It was well-made enough that he’d meant to sell it. When Cleo got it in her hands, it was like a lightning bolt had hit her: with wild delight she started attacking the log, taking big exaggerated swings and yelling fiercely. Fjord and Caduceus watched her from a safe distance away, shouting the occasional warning. “You’ve, uh, got healing on standby?” Fjord asked.

“I've got a diamond in my pocket and everything,” Caduceus said.

Cleo kept up her duel with the log even as her skinny arms started to shake under the weight of the sword. Partway through the battle, Fjord felt Caduceus shift closer to him, slipping his arm around Fjord’s back. “It’s a shame life soured you on the idea of parenthood so early on,” Caduceus said. “I think you’d make a great father.”

Fjord gave him a disbelieving side-glance. “I’m letting a kid stab a log with a sword I took off a dead body. I’m pretty sure there’s still dried blood on the hilt.”

“She lives in the middle of a graveyard,” Caduceus said. “I’m sure the ground there has coughed up worse.”

A faint, cool breeze ruffled through their hair just then, and on instinct they drew closer to one another. With the familiarity of years, Fjord fit his arm around Caduceus’s waist and let the side of his head rest against the broad plane of Caduceus’s shoulder. His heartbeat had accelerated a little when Caduceus said _father,_ but Caduceus wasn’t pursuing the topic any further. They stayed pressed together like that, warm and quiet, as they watched Cleo wage war against most of the bark on the old log.

It would’ve been so easy for Fjord to ride that moment out. The silence was comfortable; he didn’t have to break it. But the cool breeze ruffled through his hair again, and it reminded him of those peaceful moments of communion, when the Wildmother’s whisper slid past his ear on the wind. Those quiet moments when he made his promises and pledges.

_I will do difficult things in your name._

“Have you thought about it?” Fjord asked, the words sticky in his mouth. “Kids?”

Caduceus made that low, wordless rumbling sound that meant _yes_. “More when I was younger,” he said. “When everyone kept leaving, and not coming back. I always had hope that my family was still out there, but there were a few dark moments when I had to wonder if I was the last of the Clays.”

That wasn’t a line of thought that Fjord had considered. “You thought you might have a _duty_ to reproduce?” he asked.

“It sounds a little clinical when you put it that way,” Caduceus said. “I thought maybe that’s where I should be bending my thoughts, rather than thinking about other things. Everything dies in its time, but it didn’t feel like the time had come for the Clay lineage to end. Not while the blight was still there.”

That still sounded more like duty than desire to Fjord. “Fortunately,” Caduceus continued, nodding at Cleo, “unless we end up killing the next generation by letting them play with swords, my thoughts are free to bend elsewhere.”

Fjord could’ve left the topic at that. But it had been such a long time since Caduceus had lived alone in the middle of the Blooming Grove, separated from his family, plotting out his uncertain future. So much about him had changed since then. The things Caduceus was thinking about two decades ago weren’t the same as what he was thinking today.

“So you thought about whether you _should_ have kids,” Fjord said. “But did you think about whether you _wanted_ them?”

“Yes,” Caduceus said, readily, easily. “But I never got any further than ‘ _it depends_.’ It would depend on when, and with whom, and what the world looked like when it was time to bring someone into it.” His voice went musing. “I can picture myself being a parent pretty easily, I think. Not to be immodest, but I think I’d make a very good one.”

It sent a dull pain rumbling in Fjord’s stomach. “No, I know you would,” he said.

“But I wouldn’t have been a good parent a decade ago,” Caduceus said. “I loved our nomadic life too much. And I’m still getting used to being in one place right now. I keep waiting for Jester to message us saying something’s blown up, or fallen down, or been stolen.”

Fjord felt that way, too. While the world was ostensibly at peace, he knew there was always _something_ brewing under the surface, ready to rear up and need addressing. The last three months had been the quietest of his life.

Caduceus fell silent again. It made Fjord feel strange. As careful as Caduceus was to choose his words, he rarely minced them: he spoke hard truths and easy ones with almost interchangeable ease. But he had said _it depends_ when Fjord asked him if he wanted kids, and now he wasn’t following it up with anything else. He wasn’t asking Fjord his opinion on the matter, or if their new circumstances had made Fjord’s opinion change.

But, well...his opinion _hadn_ _’t_ changed, had it? Caduceus was perceptive to a fault: he could see how awkward and uncertain Fjord always got around the Clay kids. And Fjord had said flat-out in the past that he wasn’t cut out for parenthood. How could he be, when he’d never known it, growing up? Even the warm and enigmatic love of the Wildmother still sometimes felt foreign to him, after all these years.

He felt Caduceus’s arm tighten around him. “You know, there are lots of roles to play within a family,” Caduceus said. “And I think right now, you and I are the fun uncles. Isn’t that great?”

Cleo, panting with exhaustion, was hacking underhanded at the log like the sword was a machete. Even from this distance, Fjord could tell the resale value of the sword had dropped precipitously since he handed it to her. “Colton’s going to kill us when he finds out about this,” Fjord said.

“You saved the scabbard the sword came in, right?” Caduceus asked. His voice warm and satisfied. “I say we send it home with her.”

* * *

A month after Cleo left, the dented sword bouncing on her hip, Fjord woke from a light afternoon nap to the sound of a voice in his head.

_“Hi Fjord! It's Jester!”_

Fjord sat up, bleary-eyed but intent. There was a long beat of silence, probably while Jester counted out her words.

“ _Hope you're having a nice honeymoon with Caduceus! We miss you lots!_ _”_

Another pause, longer.

“ _So...remember that water genie we freed, back in—_ _”_

The message cut off mid-sentence.

“There it is,” Fjord mumbled, and climbed out of bed to find Caduceus.

* * *

Four straight months of retirement was a pretty good streak. It was startling to trade the quiet solitude of the Savalirwood for the bright bustle of Nicodranas, even if that bustle was slightly muted by the pair of irate marids currently attacking the coast. “Like, I don’t really want to fight them, because if I were them I’d be mad at Nicodranas too,” Jester said. “Xundi was enslaved just so the city could run its stupid engines. But they’re sinking a _lot_ of ships, and they’re starting to throw waves at the lighthouse. I know the lighthouse is important to you guys.”

Mother’s Lighthouse served as both a beacon to ships and a temple to the Wildmother, and while storms had been crashing against its stone edifice for a very long time, the magically accelerated water was starting to chip at the base of the sculpted female figure that jutted out from the seaward side. “I feel like if we could actually get out there and talk to Xundi, he’d remember we were the ones who freed him,” Beau said. “And maybe he’d, I don’t know, negotiate terms with us. Or at least agree to leave the lighthouse alone.”

“Yes, let’s focus on what’s _really_ important,” Veth said. “Saving those big, ancient stone boobs.”

The whole situation would’ve been easier to handle if it were just a straightforward battle, or pure negotiation. It was extremely difficult to reason with powerful beings when they were floating in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by the flotsam of ships that had unsuccessfully sailed out to make contact with them. But Fjord had promised his patron that he would do difficult things on her behalf, and that meant being agile and creative. It meant taking risks. “I’m sorry we’re not reuniting under better circumstances,” Caleb said as they packed up their gear to head out. “I know you’ve probably been enjoying the peace and quiet.”

“It’s actually kind of nice to squeeze back into the old armor,” Fjord said. And he did mean _squeeze_ : he and Caduceus had been eating very well over the last four months.

“You look good,” Caleb said. “Both of you. Your color is good. Caduceus especially, he’s very...” Caleb gestured vaguely at the air around his head. “Pink.”

Fjord had spent so much time in close proximity to Caduceus that he hadn’t really noticed a change in his color. But here, seeing Caduceus against the backdrop of the rest of their party, the difference was obvious and striking. Four months ago, when they were saying their goodbyes, Caduceus had been pale and thin, but now he stood out radiantly among everyone else, his hair as pink as a sunset, his body fuller in his armor than Fjord had ever seen it.

The sight put a painful tenderness in Fjord’s chest. He finished packing his gear and went across the room, where Caduceus was performing some kind of inscrutable maintenance on his Blightstaff with a whittling knife. When Fjord sat down next to him, Caduceus companionably braced one end of the Blightstaff against Fjord’s thigh for better leverage. “I feel like an idiot for not noticing,” Fjord said. “Your hair’s a lot brighter than it used to be.”

Caduceus glanced down at the wave of hair spilling over his shoulder and smiled. “I know it’s hard to see change when you’re staring at someone every day.” 

“Retired life must be agreeing with you.”

“I think happiness is what’s agreeing with me,” Caduceus said.

Well, shit. It was the kind of thing that made Fjord want to kiss him, if he weren’t worried that jostling the Blightstaff might send a swarm of beetles engulfing his thigh. “Are you disappointed to be called back into action?” Fjord asked.

“Not at all,” Caduceus said. “I’m happy to be wherever I need to be. These last few months, I needed to be closer to home. You saw that even before I did.”

He set the Blightstaff aside, and on mutual instinct they both moved closer to each other on the bench. “But now the Wildmother needs us to protect her temple,” Caduceus said. “And all the ships and souls who depend on it. So that’s what we’ll do.”

Fjord leaned in and kissed him, cupping the side of Caduceus’s face, the very tips of his fingers pushing into Caduceus’s sunset-pink hair. When he pulled back, Caduceus’s eyes had a familiar sparkle in them. “I have to admit it,” Caduceus said. “I’ve missed this. The excitement and uncertainty.”

“Me too,” Fjord said. “Maybe we should start picking more fights around home.”

When the entire party was packed up and ready to go, Caduceus turned to Fjord and said the same thing he’d been saying for the last decade, before they headed out into particularly dangerous confrontations. “Don’t die this time.”

It wasn’t always a promise Fjord could keep. “I’ll do my best,” he said. “But if I do, I’ll make sure to do it close to you.”

* * *

Fjord didn’t die. It was nice to know he still had skills, even in his dotage.

* * *

“I think she’ll be okay,” Jester said afterward, as they stood on the beach looking up at the towering female figure jutting out of Mother’s Lighthouse. “The waves really only hit her stomach. Her head and boobs are fine.”

There were a series of chips and cracks at the base of the statue, but they looked more unsightly than structurally dangerous. When Caduceus and Fjord went into the lighthouse, there was no sign of damage on the inner walls. They both went up to the very top, where the large enchanted crystal sent its radiant light out to sea, and they sat down to look at the breathtaking vista surrounding them. The hum and bustle of the city was muted from where they were, and the picturesqueness of the ocean was only slightly diminished by the large floating mass of ship wreckage that was slowly starting to wash up on shore.

“That could’ve gone much worse,” Caduceus said. His tone was downright cheerful.

“Yeah,” Fjord said. “It’s nice to come back and have a win. It would’ve been embarrassing to come back and just blow it.”

They watched as the late afternoon light gradually descended into sunset, painting the sandy beach orange and pink. “Did it whet your appetite for adventure again?” Caduceus asked.

Fjord thought about it. He felt like he always did after a successful endeavor: full of satisfaction, his own and the Wildmother’s, running through his veins like blood. It was a different feeling than the mellow contentment of the last four months. Could he say one was better than the other? They were both good, just different.

“You know, I kind of like this arrangement,” Fjord said. “Come out when we’re needed, stay home when we’re not.”

Caduceus smiled. “I like it too,” he said.

Fjord looked at Caduceus, his calm face in profile against the pale orange sky. _Happiness is what_ _’s agreeing with me_ , he had said before the battle began, and it had made Fjord’s heart do a somersault to hear it. It’s not like he’d doubted Caduceus was happy, but there was always a part of him that wondered if it was a complete happiness: unbroken, without any gaps it. “It really does make you happy?” Fjord asked. “Our life? There’s nothing you feel like you’re missing?”

Caduceus looked over at him, his expression gentle but curious. “Does it seem to you like I’m missing something?” he asked. “I don’t think I am, but I don’t know. Sometimes you see things in me that I don’t.”

It sent Fjord’s thoughts to where they’d been a month ago, as they stood there watching Cleo swordfight a log. When Caduceus had gone uncharacteristically silent when Fjord asked him about kids. Fjord had thought a lot about that moment in the intervening month, but he hadn’t brought the topic up again, and neither had Caduceus. And things in their life seemed fine, even with that loose thread fluttering in the wind.

But Fjord knew loose threads had a tendency to snag. He cleared his throat. “Awhile back, I asked you if you ever wanted kids,” he said. “And you said _it depends_. And then you didn’t say anything else, which felt...unusual, for you.”

Caduceus’s expression turned contemplative.

“So if you _did_ want them,” Fjord said, “what would it depend on, exactly?”

“It would depend on whether the person I’m spending my life with also wanted them,” Caduceus said. “And I feel like you would tell me, if you did.”

It was a kind, gentle answer—and a _frustrating_ one, because it put everything right back on Fjord. Caduceus kept taking that question and making it about what Fjord wanted, what Fjord thought their life should look like. As if Fjord were the kind of person who ever really _knew_ what he wanted, instead of making do with whatever chance and happenstance threw his way.

Fjord looked away, back out towards the sea. His mind churned for a moment before it landed on an idea. “Okay, tell me this,” Fjord said. “The Clays always choose names that start with _C_ , right? If you had a daughter, what would you name her?”

He looked back just in time to see the smile that raised Caduceus’s lips. “Camellia,” he said.

Relief and pain swelled up in Fjord’s chest in equal measure, because _that_ was an answer. There was no pause for thought, no hesitation: Caduceus had thought about it before. Those thoughts were _there,_ inside of him. He just wasn’t letting them out. He wasn’t letting Fjord see them. “And a son?” Fjord asked, trying not to let the strain he felt touch his voice.

“I was thinking Calder,” Caduceus said. “Or maybe Cairn. That one might be a little on-the-nose for a family that lives in a graveyard, though.”

Fjord had to smile at that, even as his heart had started hammering in his chest. So he had his answer. Caduceus _would_ want children, if Fjord wanted them. But Fjord didn’t.

Did he?

The shadows were deepening over Nicodranas below them. At some point, they’d need to make their way back to the Lavish Chateau to meet up with the rest of the Nein. But Fjord didn’t feel like he could leave yet—not with this new revelation leaving such a pit in his stomach. He said, his voice rusty, “Would you be okay if I stayed up here for a little while, alone? After everything we’ve done today, I wanted to meditate.”

“Of course,” Caduceus said. “This is the perfect place to do it. Take as long as you need.”

He kissed the side of Fjord’s face and stood. Fjord listened to the faint creak of the stairway as he descended, until he was too far away to hear anymore, and the only thing in Fjord’s ears was the sound of wind and waves.

He closed his eyes and concentrated. It was hard to do, at first. The rhythm of his heart didn’t lull him: it was too rapid, too nervous. But he breathed, and breathed, and reached out, and when he felt it—the cool air on his face turning warm—his whole body sagged forward with relief.

He heard the Wildmother's voice, or sensed it, shaped on the tones of the wind. _I owe you thanks for your courage today. I owe my thanks to both of you._

For a second, Fjord almost thought she was talking about the conversation he and Caduceus had just had—until he remembered the battle earlier that day. “The damage to the lighthouse is only superficial,” he said. “I’m sure it can be fixed.”

_It stands. That is what’s important._

He dipped his head in acknowledgment. “I admit, the battle wasn’t on my mind, just now,” he said.

_I know. Your thoughts move toward the future. Growth, and new life._

Fjord found it strange to think about that way: not children, or kids, but _new life._

 _Your thoughts circle this space often, underneath the surface,_ she said. _It troubles you._

“Yes,” Fjord said. “It does.”

The warm wind caressed his face, ruffled through his hair, but the voice stayed silent. Waiting.

Fjord breathed, slow and steady. “I know I promised you I’d push myself,” he said. “That I’d do difficult things in your name. But I’m scared of this. I’m scared of wanting it. More scared than I can remember feeling about anything.”

 _You have faced a great many fearsome things,_ she said. _What makes this different?_

The words took a long time to form on Fjord’s tongue. “I know what the stakes are if I get it wrong,” he said. “If I can’t protect them. If I fail them. I know what it feels like to struggle and suffer because a parent didn’t end up getting it right.”

 _Every child struggles and suffers_ , the Wildmother said. _Every living creature experiences pain and grief. There is no stopping it. It’s natural. It’s instructive._

“I know,” Fjord said. “I know I wouldn’t be able to stop it. But I could...alleviate it. And I don’t know how. I just...don’t know what it looks like to do it right.”

The warm wind blew quietly through his hair for a long moment. _I think perhaps I have spent too long asking you to deal with death_ , the Wildmother said. _To fight, and to protect others by vanquishing. Death is familiar to you in a way that life isn’t. Life is choice and decision, but it is also instinct. And that instinct is already written into you. It is incomplete, but it can be trusted._

Fjord’s head felt heavy. He let it fall forward, sagging on his neck. _You have served me long and well,_ the Wildmother said. _You and Caduceus both. You have used the gifts I’ve given you to great purpose. I think it’s time I offered you a new one._

Fjord lifted his head a little. “A new gift?”

_Yes. The gift of new life._

Despite the warmth of the wind, a cold shiver ran down Fjord’s spine. “What do you mean?” he asked.

 _I can give you a child,_ the Wildmother said. _Of your flesh, carried in your body. You would feel it grow, and sustain it with your life, and bring it into the world with pain and joy._

Fjord’s whole body stiffened with shock. Fear and astonishment coursed through his frozen veins. _I don’t demand this of you,_ the Wildmother said. _I place it before you, in gratitude._

The wind against Fjord’s face firmed, and with his eyes closed it felt as though a hand were cupping his cheek.

_If you ever decide to reach for it, it will be there._

Fjord opened his eyes. The warm wind was swept away by a gust of cool air, and his eyes met the fading rose and purple of the evening sky. Sunlight no longer glimmered on the ocean waves; they were only briefly illuminated by the revolving flicker of the lighthouse, sending its light out to the depths of sea.

Sitting there, at that windy height, right at the border between earth and sea, Fjord was seized with a fear unlike anything he had ever felt before. Kids, children, _new life—_ they had been abstractions, ideas. But this wasn’t an abstraction. It was so concrete it made him tremble. A child, his and Caduceus’s—a living, breathing boon of the Wildmother.

And all he had to do was reach out for it.

He wrapped his arms around himself instead. Fear squeezed his heart like a fist, the sound of his pulse in his ears drowning out the wind and waves. _I will do difficult things in your name_ , he had promised her, but never had the difficulty in question been so amorphous. Because the difficulty wasn’t in saying _yes_ or _no_.

It was in facing himself long enough to know which of those words he wanted to say.

He stayed up there on top of the lighthouse for a long time, as the rose and purple sky faded to black, as the stars came out to light up the night. When he finally descended back down the staircase, he found Caduceus sitting in front of the large viewing window a few levels down, a cooling cup of tea at his side. Caduceus stood with a smile when Fjord came near. “How was it?” he asked.

“Oh,” Fjord said weakly. “Good. She says thank you for saving the lighthouse.”

He tucked himself against Caduceus’s side, a little more forcefully than he meant to. Caduceus’s arm curved around him on instinct, even as a small crease of concern appeared on his face. “Are you okay?” Caduceus asked. “Did she say something else?”

“She asked me to make a decision,” Fjord said. He pressed his face against Caduceus’s shoulder. “And I’m going to need your help with it, because I don’t think I can face this by myself.”

* * *

They stayed three more days in Nicodranas, catching up with the others and enjoying the sunshine. When Caleb brought them back home, the reverse trip was just as startling as the trip there: the Savilirwood was quiet, its colors muted, thin wisps of morning fog still hovering above the ground.

There were things to do to fill the day. Fjord dealt with their slightly battered arms and armor while Caduceus weeded the garden, and they cooked their supper together, simpler but more comforting than the delicacies of the Lavish Chateau. When they settled into bed that evening, entwined together and close, Fjord felt a quiet calm settle over him. It was calmer than he’d felt in days. Here, in the house they’d made, in the warm grip of Caduceus’s arms, Fjord felt closer to knowing what he wanted than he ever had anywhere else.

He said, experimentally, “Camellia.”

Caduceus’s hand on his back stroked up and down, slowly. “Do you like it?

“I do,” Fjord said. “I’m not sure about Calder, though. And Cairn _is_ a little on-the-nose.”

Ford felt the rumble of faint laughter in Caduceus’s chest. “I’m open to suggestions,” Caduceus said.

And even in the safety of the moment, Fjord felt afraid: a feeling like a cold lick of ice up his spine. He clutched Caduceus a little more tightly. “It might take me a while,” he said. “To wrap my head around it. To know for sure.”

“Take all the time you need,” Caduceus said. “We’ve got plenty of it.”

* * *

Two years is what it took. Two years later, Fjord laid down in the middle of their garden, looking up at the clear blue sky through limbs of the trees surrounding their house. It was fall, and the weather was cool, and he could see each faint puff of breath as it left his lips. They were coming slower than he would’ve expected. The day before, he had been nervous, but the moment his back was tucked against the earth he felt calm, like he was cradled in the Wildmother’s hand.

Above him, _Caduceus_ looked nervous as he took a seat beside Fjord, pulling the basket of supplies into his lap. Caduceus reached forward and cupped Fjord’s cheek in his hand. His palm was faintly damp. “Are you ready?” Caduceus asked.

“I think so,” Fjord said.

Caduceus took a deep breath and reached into the basket. He started layering the components onto Fjord’s bare torso: flower petals and lichen, grass stems, wet clay. The more he layered on, the warmer Fjord felt, and after a while his eyelids fell sleepily shut.

Sometimes, on nights when dreams troubled him, Fjord remembered in excruciating detail the unnatural birth he had given on the deck of the Ball Eater, so many years ago. He remembered Caduceus’s face, ashen and contorted, channeling the Wildmother’s magic into his body. He remembered the slow, impossibly painful extraction of that heavy yellow orb: the blinking eye that had been corrupting Fjord invisibly for so long, even as his soul inched closer to the Wildmother’s light and love and comfort.

The Fjord who lay in agony on that deck would never have believed this moment was waiting for him: the moment when Fjord once more accepted his patron’s gift into his body, woven and knitted into the fabric of his flesh. Not forced, or tricked, or coerced, but asked for. All of his own free will.

Fjord lay there in his cradle of earth and listened to Caduceus’s voice, as he said the words the Wildmother taught him. And after a while it came to sound like both of their voices, speaking the words over him together. He liked that. They were the twin beacons of light in the darkness that had swallowed his life for so long, and now he could feel that light shining against his face, burning against his stomach.

And then Fjord felt the heat flare through his whole body: overwhelming, consuming, the heat of a kiln or smithy. He felt Caduceus clutch hard at his hand, and he heard Melora’s voice, as real as anything in his ear:

 _It will be difficult_. _But I know you can do it._

Then the heat vanished, and Fjord opened his eyes, and it was just the blue sky peeking through the trees again, and Caduceus’s face looking down at him. There were tears standing in his wide eyes. “Did it...?” Caduceus asked.

“I think so,” Fjord said, and he lifted his head to look down at himself. With faintly shaking hands he wiped away the remnants of petal and lichen and clay on his stomach.

And there it was. A roundedness: so faint it was almost imperceptible. He set his hands on the skin there, and it _felt_ different. Things inside of him had shifted, adjusted, made room.

He felt a drop of wetness on his chest. Caduceus’s eyes had spilled over. “Sorry,” Caduceus said, wiping the tears away. “It’s just...this is a lot.”

Fjord gingerly sat up, and Caduceus took his face in both hands and kissed him deeply. When he pulled back, there was worry on his face, more pronounced than Fjord had seen it in a long time. “You’re okay?” Caduceus asked. “You’re sure?”

Fjord picked up one of the Caduceus’s hands and moved it to the mild swell of his belly. Caduceus’s shoulders shook, almost a laugh, as his palm fit over the curve.

“It’s going to be difficult,” Fjord said. “But I think we can do it.”


End file.
